The present invention relates generally to the field of touchscreen user input devices for computers (“touchscreens”), and more particularly to touchscreens that use audio input data (“audio touchscreens”).
In some audio touchscreens, user input signals are generated by sound-to-signal transducers (herein called “microphones”) in response to a physical tap or sound-producing physical interaction (herein sometimes called a “sonic event”) against a surface (herein called an “audio touchscreen” or a “virtual touchscreen”). These user input signals are processed to determine the location, on the audio touchscreen, of the origination of the sound. Because the sound source can be located with respect to the audio touchscreen, different locations on the audio touchscreen can be used to receive different user input. A simple example of this is when the audio touchscreen is divided into areas corresponding to keys on a keyboard, and the user taps the “keys” on the audio touchscreen to enter user input in the form of alphanumeric characters.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_ad_hoc_network, as of 11 Jun. 2015) discloses as follows: “A wireless ad hoc network (WANET) is a decentralized type of wireless network. The network is ad hoc because it does not rely on a pre-existing infrastructure, such as routers in wired networks or access points in managed (infrastructure) wireless networks. Instead, each node participates in routing by forwarding data for other nodes, so the determination of which nodes forward data is made dynamically on the basis of network connectivity. In addition to the classic routing, ad hoc networks can use flooding for forwarding data . . . . Wireless mobile ad hoc networks are self-configuring, dynamic networks in which nodes are free to move.”